Consider the Oyster Farm

The bug to farm oysters bites on beautiful summer days, when other bugs – greenflies, no-see-ums – aren’t in evidence. The water is calm, the sun is shining, and there are neat lines of oystering gear emerging from the water as the tide flows out. For miles, there’s nothing but harbor, spotted with eelgrass islands and bordered by a pristine barrier beach. Bucolic, only with boats.

It bit my husband Kevin, hard. His urge to farm dates back to the fourth grade, when Sister Cora asked the class what they wanted to be when they grew up. She thought Kevin was being a wiseass when he said farmer, and made him kneel on grains of rice for his insolence. But four decades later, when he met Les Hemmila, a veteran oysterman who took him out to see the Cape Cod oyster flats, it was all over but the backbreaking labor, uncertain income, and inevitable ruin by disease or mismanagement.

“How hard can it be?” I thought when Kevin brought it up. Farming oysters seemed easier than farming things with roots or legs. They eat what floats by. They’re impervious to bad weather. They can’t run away. And I sure wasn’t going to waste one of my three lifetime marital vetoes to stop him (ask him why he doesn’t have a motorcycle). We happened to be in the right place at the right time to get an oyster grant – a lease on a little section of seabed – and we were off and running. Ahead of the game, even, because we already had a boat.

But really, picking a crop because you think it’s going to be low-maintenance is a good indication that you shouldn’t be farming in the first place. First, our boat. Boats, it turns out, are as specialized as farm equipment, and you can’t farm oysters with your 19-foot fishing boat any more than you can bale hay with your cotton gin.

Ideally, you want oyster flats to be in water shallow enough to go dry for a few hours at low tide, so you can get at your oysters more easily and let the sun kill the various aquatic life forms that foul the gear. But to get to those shallow spots, you need a flat-bottomed boat with a draft in inches. There went our already-have-a-boat advantage. We bought another boat, only to discover that it was too small to carry all the equipment. So, even though our driveway was getting crowded, we bought another, bigger one.Hey, if oyster farming doesn’t work out, we can always invade Britain.

by Tamar Haspel, Taste |  Read more:

Sand Painting

Kseniya Simonova is a Ukrainian artist who just won Ukraine's version of "America's Got Talent." She uses a giant light box, dramatic music, imagination and "sand painting" skills to interpret Germany's invasion and occupation of Ukraine during WWII.

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Iowa: The Meaningless Sideshow Begins

The 2012 presidential race officially begins today with the caucuses in Iowa, and we all know what that means …

Nothing.

The race for the White House is normally an event suffused with drama, sucking eyeballs to the page all over the globe. Just as even the non-British were at least temporarily engaged by last year’s royal wedding, people all over the world are normally fascinated by the presidential race: both dramas arouse the popular imagination as real-life versions of universal children’s fairy tales.

Instead of a tale about which maiden gets to marry the handsome prince, the campaign is an epic story, complete with a gleaming white castle at the end, about the battle to succeed to the king’s throne. Since the presidency is the most powerful office in the world, the tale has appeal for people all over the planet, from jungles to Siberian villages.

It takes an awful lot to rob the presidential race of this elemental appeal. But this year’s race has lost that buzz. In fact, this 2012 race may be the most meaningless national election campaign we’ve ever had. If the presidential race normally captivates the public as a dramatic and angry ideological battle pitting one impassioned half of society against the other, this year’s race feels like something else entirely.

In the wake of the Tea Party, the Occupy movement, and a dozen or more episodes of real rebellion on the streets, in the legislatures of cities and towns, and in state and federal courthouses, this presidential race now feels like a banal bureaucratic sideshow to the real event – the real event being a looming confrontation between huge masses of disaffected citizens on both sides of the aisle, and a corrupt and increasingly ideologically bankrupt political establishment, represented in large part by the two parties dominating this race.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

The Best American Wall Map

American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38^th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore.

At first glance, Imus’ “The Essential Geography of the United States of America” may look like any other U.S. wall map. It’s about 4 feet by 3 feet. It uses a standard, two-dimensional conic projection. It has place names. Political boundaries. Lakes, rivers, highways.

So what makes this map different from the Rand McNally version you can buy at a bookstore? Or from the dusty National Geographic pull-down mounted in your child’s elementary school classroom? Can one paper wall map really outshine all others—so definitively that it becomes award-worthy?

I’m here to tell you it can. This is a masterful map. And the secret is in its careful attention to design.

by Seth Stevenson, Slate |  Read more:

Sergio Mendes

Alexander Goudie Moules Marinieres 20th century
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Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know – from fifty feet away – what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D., is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water. And it does not look like what most people expect. There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind. To get an idea of just how quiet and undramatic from the surface drowning can be, consider this: It is the number two cause of accidental death in children, age 15 and under (just behind vehicle accidents) – of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening (source: CDC). Drowning does not look like drowning – Dr. Pia, in an article in the Coast Guard’s On Scene Magazine, described the instinctive drowning response like this:

1. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
2. Drowning people’s mouths alternately sink below and reappear above the surface of the water. The mouths of drowning people are not above the surface of the water long enough for them to exhale, inhale, and call out for help. When the drowning people’s mouths are above the surface, they exhale and inhale quickly as their mouths start to sink below the surface of the water.
3. Drowning people cannot wave for help. Nature instinctively forces them to extend their arms laterally and press down on the water’s surface. Pressing down on the surface of the water, permits drowning people to leverage their bodies so they can lift their mouths out of the water to breathe.
4. Throughout the Instinctive Drowning Response, drowning people cannot voluntarily control their arm movements. Physiologically, drowning people who are struggling on the surface of the water cannot stop drowning and perform voluntary movements such as waving for help, moving toward a rescuer, or reaching out for a piece of rescue equipment.
5. From beginning to end of the Instinctive Drowning Response people’s bodies remain upright in the water, with no evidence of a supporting kick. Unless rescued by a trained lifeguard, these drowning people can only struggle on the surface of the water from 20 to 60 seconds before submersion occurs.

(Source: On Scene Magazine: Fall 2006 (page 14)

by Mario Vittone |  Read more:

Wain's Cats

The work of Louis Wain, who lived between 1860 and 1939, is frequently held up as an example of the progression of schizophrenia, and the effects of the disorder on the perceptions of an artist.

However, despite Wain’s art appearing in several psychology text books in chapters covering schizophrenia, it is unclear whether he was suffering from that particular condition. It has been suggested that Wain may instead have been suffering from Asperger’s Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder, because his skill as a draughtsman remained plain to see throughout his illness. Diagnosis after the fact is always a sketchy business, and this suggestion may well be incorrect – one of the reported symptoms of Asperger’s is a loss of physical co-ordination.

As Wain’s condition worsened, so his pictures of cats became more abstract until, towards the end of his life, they were barely recognisable as cats at all, instead becoming intricately detailed, fractal shapes full of unnaturally (at least for a cat) bright colours. The foreknowledge that they are images of felines allows the viewer to pick up on certain shapes – the pointy triangular ears and some features of the face – but without it, you would be hard-pressed to realise these are cats.

The tale of Wain’s life is a sad one. For a time he was a successful artist, but a series of poor investment decisions left him penniless and he began to develop mental health problems in the early 20th century. He deteriorated quickly, becoming a suspicious and sometimes violent man, prone to incoherent, rambling speech. In 1924 he was incarcerated in the pauper ward at Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting, south London, not far from where I live. After intervention by some famous and influential figures, including Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister of the day, and H.G. Wells, Wain was transferred to more pleasant surroundings. He ended his days in Napsbury Hospital, north of London, which had a garden and, happily for Wain, a colony of cats. In this environment he was able to resume drawing, and it was here he produced some of his most spectacular work.

by Joseph Milton, Scientific American |  Read more:

Thomas Boone Bananas with Sun 2011

Shopping Under the Influence

After enjoying a few drinks, some people go dancing. Others order food. And for some, it’s time to shop online.

“I have my account linked to my phone, so it’s really easy,” said Tiffany Whitten, of Dayton, Ohio, whose most recent tipsy purchase made on her smartphone — a phone cover — arrived from Amazon much to her surprise. “I was drunk and I bought it, and I forgot about it, and it showed up in the mail, and I was really excited.”

Shopping under the influence has long benefited high-end specialty retailers — witness the wine-and-cheese parties that are a staple of galleries and boutiques. Now the popularity of Internet sales has opened alcohol-induced purchases to the masses, including people like Ms. Whitten, who works in shipping and receiving and spent just $5 on the cat-shaped phone cover.  (...)

Online retailers, of course, can never be sure whether customers are inebriated when they tap the “checkout” icon. One comparison-shopping site, Kelkoo, said almost half the people it surveyed in Britain, where it is based, had shopped online after drinking.

But while reliable data is hard to come by, retailers say they have their suspicions based on anecdotal evidence and traffic patterns on their Web sites — and some are adjusting their promotions accordingly.

“Post-bar, inhibitions can be impacted, and that can cause shopping, and hopefully healthy impulse buying,” said Andy Page, the president of Gilt Groupe, an online retailer that is adding more sales starting at 9 p.m. to respond to high traffic then — perhaps some of it by shoppers under the influence.

On eBay, the busiest time of day is from 6:30 to 10:30 in each time zone. Asked if drinking might be a factor, Steve Yankovich, vice president for mobile for eBay, said, “Absolutely.” He added: “I mean, if you think about what most people do when they get home from work in the evening, it’s decompression time. The consumer’s in a good mood.”

by  Stephanie Clifford, NY Times |  Read more:
Photo: Matt Nager for The New York Times

The Guiltless Pleasure

My wife, who knows everything, says there are two kinds of people in this world. First, there are people like her, mustard people, who wake up in the morning and run five miles, or at least talk about how they used to. They wear clothes ordered from catalogs, the ones that show people hiking, fly fishing, or paddling a canoe, usually beside a Labrador puppy. They eat flax and what appears to be horse feed and swear they like it, and would no more let whole milk pass their lips than hemlock. They have never had high blood pressure, except when talking about their feelings. They have never had gout, which they even like to say, but can eat a whole pound of dark chocolate without ever having to check their blood sugar. They will tell you with a straight face that sometimes they just forget to eat.

Mustard people make their doctors happy, with arteries as slick as the inside of a drinking straw, and make their children sad, by putting carrot sticks in lunchboxes, with apple slices as a special treat. They like to vacation in Colorado, and Wyoming, and the holy grail of mustard people, Portland, Oregon – really any place with hills they can walk up and down, or gorges they can plunge into on their mountain bikes. They like smoked salmon, rare tuna, and are wholly responsible for keeping the turkey population of this United States whittled down to a manageable level, one whole-grain, mustard-accented, boring sandwich at a time.

And then, there are the rest of us.

We wake and drive five miles, to eat pancakes. With any luck, that will be the only meal of the day at which we will not have mayonnaise. We like L.L. Bean catalogs, too, but only because they offer most of their clothes in XXL, and we like their running shoes, which we wear to Popeye’s, and the mailbox–if it is not too far.

We would not get near a canoe even if it was the only thing we could hide under during a lightning storm. We like to vacation in New Orleans, where you have to go uphill to drown, where every flat, easy street seems to dead end into a platter of shrimp rémoulade, fried eggplant drizzled with béarnaise, or fried oyster po’ boys slathered in … well, you know.

At home, we like any fish that comes with a side of tartar sauce, and if we are going to have a sandwich it will likely be roast beef and cheddar on an onion roll, with mustard and mayo, and we do not even mind some lettuce, tomato and hot Spanish onion, as long as the whole thing is buried under an avalanche of Zapp’s Hotter ‘n Hot Jalapeno potato chips, and served with a quart of Barq’s Root Beer or sweet iced tea.

Because, you see, we do not hate on the mustard people, at least not as much, or as often, as they sneer at us.

by Rick Bragg, Gourmet |  Read more:

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The Definitive Post On Why SOPA And Protect IP Are Bad, Bad Ideas

There's been plenty of talk (and a ton of posts here on Techdirt) discussing both SOPA (originally E-PARASITE) and PROTECT IP (aka PIPA), but it seemed like it would be useful to create a single, "definitive" post to highlight why both of these bills are extremely problematic and won't do much (if anything) to deal with the issues they're supposed to deal with, but will have massive unintended consequences. I also think it's important to highlight how PIPA is almost as bad as SOPA. Tragically, because SOPA was so bad, some in the entertainment industry have seen it as an opportunity to present PIPA as a "compromise." It is not. Both bills have tremendous problems, and they start with the fact that neither bill will help deal with the actual issues being raised.

That main issue, we're told over and over again, is "piracy" and specifically "rogue" websites. And, let's be clear: infringement is a problem. But the question is what kind of problem is it? Much of the evidence suggests that it's not an enforcement problem and it's not a legal problem. Decades of evidence from around the globe all show the same thing: making copyright law or enforcement stricter does not work. It does not decrease infringement at all -- and, quite frequently, leads to more infringement. That's because the reason that there's infringement in the first place is that consumers are being under-served. Historically, infringement has never been about "free," but about indicating where the business models have not kept up with the technology.

Thus, the real issue is that this is a business model problem. As we've seen over and over and over again, those who embrace what the internet enables, have found themselves to be much better off than they were before. They're able to build up larger fanbases, and to rely on various new platforms and services to make more money.

And, as we've seen with near perfect consistency, the best way, by far, to decrease infringement is to offer awesome new services that are convenient and useful. This doesn't mean just offering any old service -- and it certainly doesn't mean trying to limit what users can do with those services. And, most importantly, it doesn't mean treating consumers like they were criminals and "pirates." It means constantly improving the consumer experience. When that consumer experience is great, then people switch in droves. You can, absolutely, compete with free, and many do so. If more were able to without restriction, infringement would decrease. If you look at the two largest contributors to holding back "piracy" lately, it's been Netflix and Spotify. Those two services alone have been orders of magnitude more successful in decreasing infringement than any new copyright law. Because they compete by being more convenient and a better experience than infringement.

Finally, even if you disagree with all of that, and believe that the problem is enforcement, SOPA and PIPA, won't be effective in dealing with that. The internet always has a way of routing around "damage" no matter how hard people try to stop it, and the approach put forth by these bills is a joke. It's hard to find anyone with technology skills who thinks that they will be effective. Every "blockade" has an easy path around it, and the supposed "anti-circumvention" rule in SOPA will never deal with the more obvious paths around things like DNS blocking (use a different DNS or a perfectly legal foreign VPN system). The private right of action efforts are also mistargeted. They're based on the premise that infringement is done for monetary reasons. It's amusing that just a few years ago, these same industries insisted that music and movie fans never wanted to pay anything any more, but now they're claiming that these same people are paying for cyberlockers all the time? That's simply not credible. And if there's so much money to be made, the studios and labels would be opening their own cyberlockers. Either way, we've watched this game of Whac-a-mole for over a decade. It doesn't work. Every site that is shut down leads to half a dozen new ones that spring up. This is not how you tackle a problem: by making the same mistake made over and over again in the past.

So... SOPA & PIPA don't attack the real problem, do nothing to build up the services that do solve the problem, and won't work from a technological standpoint. And that's just if we look at the what these bills are supposed to do.

The real fear is the massive collateral damage these bills will have to jobs, the economy and innovation.

by Mike Masnick, Techdirt |  Read more:

Platform Wars

Want to learn MBA management skills and strategies for free?  Thanks to "Platform Wars," a video game simulator created by MIT’s Sloan School of Management, anyone can learn elements of a business school education by portraying an executive at a video game console manufacturer online.

The simulator has been used for the past four years in business management classes taught by professor John Sterman. A user playing an executive Nintendo, for example, might be tasked with figuring out how how to help the Wii beat out competition from Microsoft's XBox. The ultimate goal is to strategize against your competitor to maximize cumulative profit over 10 years. The player has to make all the applicable decisions to win the market—everything from setting the price of the console to determining the royalties video game makers will pay for the right to produce games for the platform.

“Platform Wars” proved to be so popular at the business school that in late November, MIT—the home of the renowned OpenCourseWare program—decided to make the simulator available to the public on the MIT Sloane Teaching Innovation Resources website. Users can play as an individual or as a class. To fully equip gamers, Sterman is also providing free case studies and video explanations for both students and teachers.

Platform markets “are increasingly common in settings besides video games,” so Sterman says that the skills users can learn through Platform Wars are “applicable in many markets." Figuring out how to ensure your product’s price, features, and complementary products stay competitive is in every business' best interests. After all, we all know what happened in the real-world platform war between VHS and Betamax.

by Liz Dwyer, Good |  Read more:

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Why We Make Bad Decisions

What role do our surroundings have in the choices we make? Consider the fact that we are more likely to commit a “random” act of kindness toward a person who has already done something kind toward us. We are less likely to help someone in serious trouble when we’re in a crowd, or choose different professions based on the sound and spelling of our first names. It turns out the context in which we make our decisions has a huge impact on their outcomes.

In his new book “Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World,” author Sam Sommers, an associate professor of psychology at Tufts University, looks at what context can teach us about everything from test questions to romantic partners to career choices. Sommers offers a fascinating glimpse into the way our most important judgments are framed by the world around us.

Salon spoke with Sommers over the phone about Occupy Wall Street, online dating and Penn State’s Joe Paterno riot.

In the book you argue that this perception that, as you describe it, “What you see is what you get” is flawed and dangerous. Why are judgments based on first impressions misguided?

It’s our default assumption. It’s our fallback, automatic assumption about other people. It serves us well in a lot of respects. It makes the world a more predictable place. It allows us to make predictions about the world. But a variety of different research over the past few decades shows that this automatic judgment is a cognitive cutting of corners. It doesn’t give an accurate perspective on how human nature works. One of the really good examples is the quickness with which we turn to the “bad apple” explanation. When we read about bad behavior, whether it’s people committing crimes, rioting, etc., we immediately assume that that person is a bad apple, that we would never do something like that. It makes us feel better about ourselves at the end of the day, but it keeps us from solving some of the root issues at the heart of human nature.

by Hannah Tepper, Salon |  Read more:
Illustration: VLADGRIN via Shutterstock

Rejoice for Utopia is Nigh!

One hundred years ago an American immigrant invented science fiction.

Okay, that’s not true. Not even close. People have been building fantastic narratives out of scientific gobbledygook since the days of the Greeks. Lucian of Samosata imagined a trip to the moon over 17 centuries before Jules Verne took a whack at it. And decades before 1911 Verne and H.G. Wells wrote the stories that established the contours of the genre: fantastic voyages in space and time, alien encounters, technology run amok, and so forth. The term “science fiction” wouldn’t even be invented until 1929. But the genre as a coherent field of literary endeavour—as the thing that takes up a whole wall at your local Barnes & Noble or Waterstone’s—might not have come to be if it weren’t for a failed inventor-turned-publisher with aesthetic ambitions. Naive, utopian and romantic, a man named Hugo Gernsback ended up establishing a new strand of science fiction, one that helped shape (and was shaped by) the American century.

Gernsback had come to America in 1904 with the common immigrant dream of striking it rich. He planned to revolutionise battery technology, but when that didn’t pan out he turned to scientific-magazine publishing. He started out with mail-order catalogues for his imported radio-equipment business, but, as the years went on, his efforts took a more explicitly literary turn. Amazing Stories, which he founded in 1926, has a fair claim to being the first magazine dedicated solely to what he called “scientifiction”. It would go on to help define the genre, publishing the debuts of some of its greatest authors. The ever-expanding community of science-fiction readers and fans was so grateful it named its highest honour after him; there isn’t an science-fiction writer from Asimov to Zelazny who hasn’t coveted a Hugo trophy.

But in 1911 all that lay in the future—a topic which, to be fair, was something Gernsback was pretty interested in. As a young man of 27, he was witnessing a new century and a newly revitalised country all at once. America’s can-do spirit involved a gleeful embrace of technology (the trans-continental railroad! The wizard of Menlo Park: Thomas Edison! Henry Ford’s Model T!). New inventions, discoveries and achievements seemed to be rolling off the brand-new assembly line every day, and the factual articles of Modern Electrics, Gernsback’s magazine (its name a kind of romantic statement itself), were hardly capacious enough to contain the sense of possibility. And so he turned, diffidently, to fiction.

by Prospero, The Economist |  Read more:

Portlandia

A smugly enamored couple sit in a restaurant, their hands clasped as they fret over the menu. The chicken, for instance: can the waitress tell them a little bit about its provenance? Of course she can, because this is the kind of cool restaurant in Portland, Oregon, where patrons regularly seek elaborate assurances about the virtuousness of their food. The waitress informs the couple that the place serves only local, free-range, “heritage-breed, woodland-raised chicken that’s been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.” But because the diners, Peter and Nance, are characters on “Portlandia”—a television comedy in which precious concerns spin into giddy lunacy—the conversation does not stop there. Peter, played by Fred Armisen, asks if the hazelnuts, too, are local. Nance, played by Carrie Brownstein, needs to know the size of the parcel of land where the chicken roamed freely. (Four acres.) The waitress excuses herself and returns to the table with a file folder and a photograph. “Here is the chicken you’ll be enjoying tonight,” she says, with therapeutic solemnity. “His name was Colin.” Peter seems appeased: “He looks like a happy little guy who runs around.” But then he wonders if the animal had “a lot of friends—other chickens as friends?” The waitress, who finds this a reasonable question, admits, “I don’t know that I can speak to that level of intimate knowledge about him.”

“Portlandia,” which débuted last winter, on the Independent Film Channel, and returns on January 6th, is the rare sketch-comedy series that has a sustained object of satire. It’s about life in hipster enclaves, and the self-consciousness that makes hipsters desperately disavow the label. Many of its characters are caught up in the prideful culture of D.I.Y. entrepreneurship, in which people reject office jobs in favor of becoming, say, an appliqué-pillow designer with a page on Etsy. (This season, a couple launch a business based on the catchphrase “We can pickle that!,” brining everything from eggs at an urban farm to a broken high heel found on the sidewalk.) “Portlandia” is an extended joke about what Freud called the narcissism of small differences: the need to distinguish oneself by minute shadings and to insist, with outsized militancy, on the importance of those shadings.

Brownstein, who is also one of the show’s writers and producers, told me, “In general, things in a place like Portland are really great, so little concerns become ridiculous. There are a lot of people here who can afford—financially but also psychologically—to be really, really concerned about buying local, for instance. It becomes mock epic. It’s like Alexander Pope’s ‘Rape of the Lock.’ I was standing in line at Whole Foods, and the guy in front of me says, ‘I really wish you guys sold locally made fresh pasta.’ And the cashier says, ‘Look, we do.’ And the guy says, ‘No, no—that’s from Seattle.’ Really? You don’t have a bigger battle?”

“Portlandia” presents a heightened version of the city’s twee urbanity: a company sells artisanal light bulbs, a hotel offers a manual typewriter to every guest, and a big local event is the Allergy Pride Parade. The mayor, played by Kyle MacLachlan, becomes an object of scandal when he’s “outed” as the bass guitarist in a middle-of-the-road reggae band. (The real Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, who is openly gay, plays MacLachlan’s assistant on the show.) Armisen and Brownstein, wearing anthropologically precise wigs and outfits, portray most of the main characters: bicycle-rights activists, dumpster divers, campaigners against any theoretical attempt to bring the Olympics to Portland, animal lovers so out of touch that they free a pet dog tied up outside a restaurant. (“Who puts their dog on a pole like a stripper?”) Many characters recur, and, because they often seem to know one another, their intersections from sketch to sketch give the show the feel of a grownup “Sesame Street.” This childlike vibe has an edge to it, however; as an Armisen character explains at one point, Portland is “where young people go to retire.”

by Margaret Talbot, NewYorker |  Read more:
Photograph by Gabriele Stabile

What is the Greatest Invention?

Different writers at More Intelligent Life offer their own answers. Samantha Weinberg argues it is the Web. Edward Carr makes the case for the blade. Roger Highfield's candidate, the modern scientific method, is probably the answer I agree with most:

All great inventions rest on understanding how things work. And the greatest of all is the über-invention that has provided the insights on which other inventions depend: the modern scientific method, the realisation that we cannot grasp the way the world works by rational thought alone.

To gain meaningful insights into the scheme of things, logic has to be accompanied by asking probing questions of nature. To advance understanding, we need to devise rational conjectures and probe them to destruction through controlled tests, precise observations and clever analysis. The upshot is an unending dialogue between theory and experiment.

Unlike a traditional invention, the scientific method did not come into being at a particular time: its history is complex and stretches back long before 1833, when the term “scientist” was coined by the English polymath William Whewell. The method is not a concrete gadget like Gutenberg’s press, the computer or the Pill. Nor is it a brainwave like the non-geocentric universe, the Indo-Arab counting system or the theory of evolution. It is a fecund way of thinking on which the modern world rests. In relatively few generations, the rigorous application of the method has bootstrapped modern society through a non-linear accumulation of both knowledge and technology. Its impact on everyday life is ubiquitous and indisputable, even though a surprising number of people, including some senior politicians, have only a feeble grasp of its significance.

 via: 3 Quarks Daily and More Intelligent Life